Let it be known that this is an intended abstraction. It's a flowy, lucid work inspired highly by the hyper ongoing poetry spoken by Ani DiFranco. Points of emphasis in italics. This work is best if read aloud. It's about a 5-min read. Please take the gaps and spaces into consideration, and halt at them for further effect. Hope you enjoy. - KittyBee
PS: I know about the hoard of grammar mistakes and sorts of things that, by the books, flaw this work. It's, again, an intended abstraction and most (if not all) of the "errors" are in place for further effect.
Not to long ago we went to a theater
Snuck away, snuck across and did some
of the best things I’ve done and
It was uplifting
Unforgiving
It was helping
and melting
I found my self swelling
and swollen with my
bloody heart
it must have stopped beating
It must have forgotten to beat
When I kissed those two tart--
Tulips had no meaning to me
nor my collection of candles at home
Or my one-two ex boyfriend
Or my nails and
And it was just one-two you
and
It was all I ever wanted to do
And
You were the only one who
I
Well I can’t explain it.
How could I describe such an adventure
such an advent
A "can it"
A "bless it"
A "test it"
"Caress it"
and
Oh
Here we are again
Me in Miami, you in Brooklyn
And I’m drowning in tropical storms and
You’re jumping off of bridges
Can we just
forgive it
Yet
Here
Here is where it all began isn’t it?
On a basketball court in a school gym
Yes
This is where I became self aware
Yes
This is where I decided to cut my hair
and trespass into an undecided pre-ignited phase of face
to explore each and every space to which my face could see to
And all I saw was
Hah
Well you know
All I saw was
HAH
You,
You know
And in a turbulent chaos
Of unforgiving events
I found myself
Out of breath
Breath
Breath
Breathe! Breathe!
And I’m in every emergency room across the country
They’re blaming it on my asthma hah,
they think it’s
my asthma
They can’t even begin to recognize
What it looks like
To be fresh out of a pool of lies--
Lies fed by mother, by father
by all one another and--
Oh,
I can’t blame my mother
Oh,
I can’t blame anybody
Because everybody else is all ship-shaped into another
chaos
designated by the woman more obsessed with the
12-10 play-offs
of her kids
junior baseball league
Stealin’ hubbies money for her manicures
now that’s what I call greed
And so I went hungry and helpless
Starving, I felt this
this need to cling
So I clung onto well
Onto you
And I remember laying in my bed
With red blankets
And red gold sheets
Thinking of all the things you said
you’d do to me
And you told me to sleep with a picture of you under my pillow
So I’d dream of you
And sadly every nightmare I dreamt of
came very true
So here we are
at square one again
here we are
making awkward gestures trying to hide out
underneath a silly simple label
talking once a week--
or once a day--
playing it cool and
going off as
friend
again
You know once you told me I was the
easiest person to talk to
Did something happen?
Was it when I ran away and left you
or did you throw me away
did I run
did you throw
can’t remember
All I know--
I had to go
so I did
And by December
You were out of my life and
I was a free bird
Waiting for my new set of wings to come in and carry me to heaven
Free bird
Free
words ceased to leak from my pens or fingertips
My one-two one true muse
You
Were gone
and you’d been gone
You spent summer gone
and I hopped into the arms of anybody who would hold me
Sold me clean and creamed run by a machine
Who set me up at a new school
A rusty red hammer in a shed of
new tools
And I was
so cool
learning French and
sitting on the Fence with the weird kids
while you were
taking your first sips of liquor
While those two perfect lips
were wasting into thicker
drinks
And all was well as hell
until March on your birthday when
you told me you missed me
you said
I miss you
hah
I guess
and I jumped at the action
Because of that air of attraction
That you left me in
Let me see that ass
Let me see those hips
Let me touch those breasts
Let me bite those lips
Let me-- Let me--
And out of a
sour
hour
We fell very short and very fast
Because by June I’d done said all the wrong words
and you’d said this couldn’t last but--
but by next March
after months of me thinking of you thinking of me
thinking of you
of me
of you
of me and you
I begged
for you back
said I’m SORRY
I’ll make it BETTER
Won’t say that L word
anymore
and I lied
Hello! Just come here from humming bird. And, although I prefer humming bird, I quite like this too. I like it because, when you wantedto, you use words to convey ffeeling rather than meaning.
The only criticism I would give, and I realize this may be on purpose, there Iis no full stop at the end. I am not criticising this as a grammatical mistake, merely I think it would induce finallity.
Hope this helps,
Take That You Fiend!
So I've had this one sitting in an open tab for a few days now. Finally I'm going to review it. Hooray for you..
Straight off the bat, let's talk about imagery. It's the bricks and mortar of modern poetry. While there is nothing here that absolutely knocked me dead with its brilliance, for the most part you trot along ok.
Stuff like this is ok. Like I said, not earth-shattering, but ok. But every time you start to get on a role you seem to clunk to a halt rather than changing gears.
Stuff like this though? Bleh. Stuff like this is dead space. It saps the whole thing of any forward motion it had. And to show you a reason why you're lacking in imagery so much; it's a general rule of thumb that unless your writing is so powerful and amazing and widely acclaimed and respected, your lines cannot end with weak words: us, like, they, them, and, it, etc. Particles, transitions, articles, and on. You need images, strong words, words that create space and movement to keep us reading. Transitional words themselves may transition but they become a chore in monotony here. Fix your line breaks, you'll see immediate improvement.
Second, let's talk about style. I've tried the lucid stream-of-consciousness stuff before, and it's hard. Real hard. It's also extremely hard to read, so obviously the author has to figure out how to keep their audience reading. The trick, I find, is in the intensity (and more importantly, the variation therein). There must be some form of transposition to keep the thing moving. Kind of like a car; start in first gear, shift up to second, to third, etc. This piece here reaches about second, and stays there before eventually fizzling out. I like the attempt, but you haven't pulled it off. You need to learn to perpetually increase the energy. Of course, the only ways to do this is practice, and study. Read a heap of is. Joyce's Ulysses sets the bar, obviously, but check out Dave Eggers, Toni Morrison, and Brendan Connell as well. Read, read, read. Emulate the masters.
Finally, content. There's a lot in there. Too much, I think, to be efficient. If you want to write a treatise, stick to prose. Don't overdo it in your poetry. Too many ideas and none of them stick. Refine it down. Cut, cut, cut. Kill your darlings. Halve the length, then start from there.
It's cool, it has loads of potential, but it's definitely a diamond in the rough.
K.
Hey there, I'm June,
I like the voice of this poem a lot-- it's kind of adventurous and holds the readers interest as it moves along.
The excessive description here ruins what you're building here. Luckily, you manage to get the poem back on track rather rapidly, but here, you're lingering on an "it" that was uplifting-- and I think it should be a "they" because you say that they were some of the best THINGS you did, not the best thing, singular, that you did. Dwelling on the description of these things, pauses the poem.
I'm not a terrible fan of poems that tell tales of youthful rendezvous, but I can appreciate the detail you worked into this poem. It added great character to the tone of the poem.
Happy review day,
June
Hey Kitty,
there's a strong voice that is evident throughout this piece, and while usually I'm picky about lines and pacing and things, I did feel like you made a great choice in your white space and line breaks - it gave this poem great momentum and movement. I can definitely see this as a spoken word piece, with its length and style, and with its subject matter.
Probably my absolute favorite part -- was somewhere down the middle, and the narrator is gasping for breath and I felt a really strong connection there with all those hahs in place, there's a strong and vivid image transpiring, and you really sense this emotional breakdown and you're expecting this collapse, or you just see this fragile speaker, here, in great distress, and there's this real frantic feel about it, and that's just -- that's fantastic. Not many a poem can really achieve such an emotional effect such as that and done in such an original way, I applaud you ^__^
But I've got to be honest with you too, while somewhere from the beginning to midway, we have gotten this sense of pausing mid-sentence, of sort of going around the topic of the speaker's love, and then we get that asthma scene, and I'm almost convinced by that point that somebody has died. It must be the dramatics of the piece, but I'm just thinking that there's this really tragic romeo-juliet thing happening, and when it was just another case of breakup/longdistance sort of thing, it turned a bit anticlimatic for me, almost like there was way too much buildup.
I didn't feel this poem was too long, but I would suggest cutting this part out:
just cut it out completely, for me it sort of took me out of the narration and focus of the piece, and instead of the lovely lyrical piece that this is, by this point it veered into an angry rant/political piece. I think maybe the poem would flow much smoother and be stronger/more in focus without it, and I don't think you would lose much at all.
I hope this helps! Keep writing!
~ as always, Audy
Wow I love the flow and the gaps and everything that you changed to give the poem a voice! Don't be nervous, it's an amazing poem! I can't really point out anything wrong with it I just really like it. It's deffinately a poem that would sound great peformed. I hope you keep writing more poems like this.
Keep up the good work and keep writing!
-SP
Hi kittybee.Good day,
I just take a deep breath when I read this poem!I watched your theatre about your life-your lover,your parents and anything you felt inside?Its quite a very long saying just about something miserable here.You might be in a burst of feelings when you wrote this?Just wanna say here,keep writing in YWS.
Oh the boiling anxiety that's raging through my blood as I post this. Please don't be too rough, guys. x///x